Lessig: The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge – Call for Subtitlers

By Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues
ETCJ Associate Administrator

On April 18, 2011, Lawrence Lessig gave a lecture entitled “The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge: Just How Badly We Have Messed This Up” at CERN in Geneva, CH (see announcement). He has now uploaded the video of this lecture at youtube.com/watch?v=2me7hptVGzI, with the following description:

Lecture at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18 April 2011: A new talk about open access to academic or scientific information, with a bit of commentary about YouTube Copyright School.

(YouTube Copyright School: youtube.com/copyright_school – see also YouTube Copyright Education (remixed) on YT’s official blog, April 14, 2011)

In view of the interest of this lecture for researchers and educators, I have started a subtitling page for it at Universal Subtitles: universalsubtitles.org/videos/jD5TB2eebD5d. If you are interested in collaborating in this subtitling, here are a few practical indications:

Using Universal Subtitles

You need to create a Universal Subtitles account in order to use it. All contributions to subtitles are acknowledged in the “History” part of the page.

The first stage of social subtitling with Universal Subtitles (making subtitles in the original language) is divided in 4 substages:

  1. transcribing
  2. synchronizing the transcription to make subtitles
  3. checking the subtitles
  4. publishing the subtitles

For each substage, there is a preliminary video tutorial, and clear instructions on the work page.

Subtitles in other languages, as with other subtitling platforms, are made by translating the original subtitles, without having to go through the substages above.

So far, I have only begun the English transcription of Lessig’s lecture. I’ll add information on the progress of through the other stages here  – update: not here but on the Lessig_Architecture_A2K page of ETCJ’s wiki, under Progress (presently, the transcript is complete, and synchronized up to 32:10).

If  you have further questions, you can post them in the comments, or e-mail me at claude.almansi@gmail.com.

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